Yeah the performance would be Anemic.But, again. Faster than Intel Atom and ARM, but then again you wouldn't be buying a device such as this to play Crysis and the Dual-Core 800mhz Sandy Bridge chip would still be a crap-ton better than Atom powered netbooks.Reply

The people who read this site would never buy this as a replacement for their main device so there is no need to look at how your daily work flow would not work on this device and make it go cry in the corner.

People are looking at this as a second device. I have a great desktop with two monitors and all the bells and whistles if I need to get work done. My second device is a old dell laptop that use in front of the couch or in bed that is the device that this was meant to be/replace.Reply

I've actually been considering getting one of these things for my dad as a primary PC simply because he could still check his mail and do his banking while, at the same time, it would be difficult for him to mess it up.

So, let's not make too many assumptions about the readers. We don't all fit your personal usage style or preconceptions. Reply

You are making my point the person who ends up with it is going to be using it very sparingly. Your dad is not going to have the work flow that is described in the article, if would be much more facebook and email.Reply

So, I think you'd be surprised how many writers see the appeal of the Chromebook. Writing is often a matter of focus. Eliminate distractions and pull together only the resources you need to get the job done. Browser-based publishing tools are polished enough that several of us are actually using them exclusively, including some that even do image manipulations entirely in the browser.

So, the Chromebook as a primary device has a lot of appeal.What I was trying to make clear is how it falters despite having plenty of potential. I have no doubt that as the performance of Chromebooks improves, and as browser-based publishing and media tools become more capable, that I could move to a Chromebook as a primary writing device. I'd still need a better equipped device for a lot of the benchmarking we do, but it'd very much end up being the second device. Reply

Actually I can see a lot of people using this as their only computer. If you do not game then this is ideal for a good number of home users. Thing of what a lot of home users do.1. Facebook,2. Amazon.3 Banking/investments.4. Email.5. Netflix.6. YouTube.7. Pandora.8 if a student writing papers.

Will it do Netflix? Doesn't netflix use .Net?A lack of a spotify app could be an issue but then again RDIO doesn't need an app.Google Docs is good enough for a lot of folks. With more and more moving to the web this really does make some sence for users. I would probably put Ubuntu on it but that is just me.Reply

The problem with Chromebooks is the Chrome OS which is, at best, a Google side project. It's feels incomplete like an early beta release and the resulting compromises make it overpriced even at $200. Reply

The performance figures are really bad in my opinion. The A15 is dangerously close to the SNB Celeron. I am looking forward to more tests between those chips. And I wonder what the implications are for the 13W IVB/10W Haswell chips.As for the laptop itself, it costs between 231€ (amazon.co.uk) and 269€ (.nl shop) in Europe, which means it competes with AMD E and C processor based notebooks (starting at 200€ without OS and 270€ / 300€ with full Win7/8 OS) and I don't see any advantage for this one.Reply

What performance are you talking about? This Celeron is the lowest SB can go, it has no HT, no turbo and works at 800 MHz. Anything at a higher frequency would make the difference enormous. And Ivy would only add to that and lower the power consumption.An AMD E or C would be comparable to the Atom and lose to this Celeron too (800 MHz vs 1700 MHz).Reply

I didn't draw a performance comparison between the Celeron and the E and C AMDs, I only drew one between the A15 and the Celeron. Yes, it is the lowest one out there and it is clocked even lower. But considering that it is still a chip from Intel, done on a competitive and proven 32nm process with a 17W TDP, the performance delta over the A15 is pretty low in my opinion. And the 13W TDP IVB and low power Haswell chips will get there by significantly reducing clocks as well. I'm not saying it is slower, but considering everything Intel has over the other chips manufacturers, such a small lead is surprising to me.Reply

Celeron chips are Intel's not quite worthless dies salvaged for whatever they can get away with selling them for. They've always had horrid performance/watt numbers. The fact that a near garbage grade 2 year old design is still competitive with the best that Arm has to offer says something completely different; as does Intel's 17W IVB chips being nominally upto ~4-7x faster (dual core, HT, and 1.9-2.8ghz). Chop that in half to look at a single core and you're at ~2.3.5x the performance for only marginally above the A15's max power; do the same with the 13W TDP part (1.5-2.4 ghz) ~2-3x performance at a slightly lower TDP.Reply

That Celeron may be rated at 17w TDP, but I bet it doesnt even get CLOSE to that in reality. It's probably more in the 5-7W realm realistically. Think about it, 800Mhz, very little cache, no HT, no Turbo... Also considering that the Exynos 5 is running at up to 1.7Ghz, which is over twice the clockspeed, it firmly puts the performance differences into perspective. The Intel chip is straight up smoking that ARM chip. Reply

MHz does matter. Sandy Bridge is not optimized to actively run at 800MHz - its sweet spot is around 3GHz. You pay a huge perf/watt penalty through leakage. An i7 doing the same tasks can go to sleep and power gate in 1/4 the time.Reply

I think it could be the case that making an architectural change yields significant benefits, however after you while you'd end up like Intel, spending a huge amount of money to eke out a few more percent. I doubt that the next big step for ARM would be anything like A9 to A15 was.Reply

I know when I saw the benchmarks I had to go back and look at the x86 specs. For a second I thought the A15 was way faster than I expected. But then I saw just how crippled the celeron is and everything made sense...Reply

Others pointed this out, but the take away from performance a performance standpoint is that if you take the second fastest x86 core designs in the market today, gut them, take out their legs, wrap a chain around their neck and put blinders on them, they're still faster than the fastest ARM Cortex-based SoC on the market today.

The big play with A15 is that they have finally reached IPC parity with small notebooks. And while that would have definitely been true 5 years ago when Atom was still fresh and Sandy Bridge was off the edge of Intel's road map slides, it is now not nearly so strong a case. In terms of performance/watt, ARM has done a very very good thing and they should be commended for that. And I have no doubt that a Chromebook equipped with Exynos 5 clocked at 2.3GHz would wipe the floor with the Acer C7. But we're still talking about putting a featherweight champion against a heavyweight punching bag.

We'll explore this relationship a little further, indeed you can get some feel of it in Anand's reviews of the Win8 tablets that have been coming out. Stay tuned. Reply

Hmm, but the graphics are an important point, and it seems like ARM (Mali-series) and Nvidia have a better roadmap there. Maybe a T4 Chromebook could take down an Ivy or Haswell ULP? Or an Exynos-Quad?

Never mind the fact that this product, in similar fashion to the Droid phones, is designed entirely with the focus of mining, harvesting, and exploiting your personal data for their profit. No thank you, Google. Hell, I'll pay the Dell/HP "premium" of a $299 or $399 laptop/ultrabook to avoid that whole arrangement. Mind you, I've already happily paid the Apple premium to have devices focused on my ease of using them rather than the ease of which my information is exploited. Apple has a much better track record in respecting user's privacy, making the disclosure of it voluntary rather than inherent to the products being used.Reply

Maybe I missed it, but there is also the 100 gigs of google drive offered for 2 years for free w/purchase. If you use drive, that storage would be about $5/mo thereby making this device cost basically $80. Not bad.Reply

You have a typo on your Display page - resolution reads 1136x768 when it should be 1366x768.

Otherwise - thanks for the review. I'm not sure if I'd want one of these, since my Nexus 7 does most of what you'd do with this device just fine, but I am going to keep these in mind for people who just want a web browser / "typewriter" out of a computer.Reply

In the terminal I was able to run cat /proc/cpuinfo during lots of scenarios and the output was always 800MHz. Since there's no way to run monitoring programs in a Chrome OS instance, and since the clock and voltage tables aren't exposed as they were in the Samsung Chromebook, we don't know whether this is an intermediate state, but based on the results I'm confident of that figure as the max clock. Reply

That uses a Celeron B840 which is clocked at 1.9GHz, and since it isn't running on a battery they'd have no reason to underclock it. If you scale its Sunspider score of 296ms from 1.9GHz to 1.1GHz you get 511ms, which fits perfectly with the values you got in this review. At 800MHz you would expect a number closer to 700ms. This is assuming linear scaling, but given Sunspider is single threaded and these are fairly low clocks for both I doubt you'd get much worse. I also doubt that V8 made huge improvements in its x86 performance since then.Reply

Hi, it is definitely a 1.1Ghz processor, but has cpu frequency scaling enabled like any other modern system. I'm not sure what scenarios you ran but looking at /proc/cpuinfo isn't really the best way to determine frequency. At the minmum, you should be looking at /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freqbut running something like powertop or i7z would be even better (you can copy them onto the C7 from another 32-bit Linux system)

I'd do something like this, put it into dev mode, open a window for crosh (ctrl-alt-t) and run the shell from there sudo to become rootthen runwatch -d cat /sys/devices/system/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

I've been trying out Lenovo Q180 Nettops recently. The ones I've been rolling out have the top end 2.1Ghz Atom in them, with 4GB of ram and a HD6450 GPU in them.

Tally this together with a Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD and the computing experience is pretty good. In all the usual computing tasks I couldn't tell it was an Atom based machine. It felt as fast and fluid as any full size x86 PC I have around. I've rolled a few of them out to small businesses and feedback has been excellent.

The problem with Atom is that makers feel they have an excuse to pair them up with even crappier hardware. Throw in an Atom chip with some decent supporting hardware and you have a pretty good low power setup.Reply

Fair enough, I'm trying to get a nice light set-up that would facilitate more bokeh-free shots, but in the meanwhile I'm generally just trying to keep people from seeing the mess my house is generally in. :) Thanks for the compliment.

The 20 second bootup and log in time greatly beats my Windows and Mac based computers. The price was more than right. The 320 hard drive storage "covers a multitude of sins", if any there be. I think both Google and Acer got it more than right this time! Thanks to both!Reply